The basics

In a nutshell, social media marketing is using certain websites like Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Pinterest, Google+ and YouTube for marketing your business’s products or services. Since these are the sites that people spend most of their time on these days, it makes sense to go where the potential customers are.

Think about it- Facebook has over 1.1 BILLION (yes, with a B) users. That’s a ridiculous amount, as it’s about 1/7th of the world’s population.

YouTube has thousands of hours of video uploaded every day and is free to watch. No wonder so many people spend their spare time there.

The Problem with Social Media Marketing

Even though this is a great form of advertising, you have to consider why people spend time on these websites.

99% of them are there for personal, non-shopping purposes. On Facebook, they want to see what friends are up to. Pinterest and YouTube are often used to find something funny or educational. Twitter is used to get quick news feeds from friends, celebrities or even “real” news channels.

Because people aren’t exactly in shopping mode with social media, it can be tricky to convert this kind of traffic. If someone hops onto Facebook to chat with friends, they probably don’t want to see your advertisement pop up in their face.

Does that mean this form of marketing is impossible? Of course not- if it was, it wouldn’t be so popular.

It just means that you have to play smart.

How to Get Started

There can be entire college classes on social media marketing- but for now, let’s go over the basics.

To get started, here are a few simple things you need to do. Once you’ve done at least 1-2, you can start looking into more advanced tactics and paying money for ads.

Start a Facebook page for your website. Post to it at least every 3-4 days- news on upcoming products or services, polls or questions for people to answer, or even fun stuff like funny stories or pictures. Also check out other related pages and be sure to “Like” them. Facebook is all about conversing and connecting!

Create a Twitter account and “follow” a few professional groups in your industry. You can also consider following your loyal customers, and hopefully they’ll reciprocate. Post to it at the same time as your Facebook page- that way it’s easier to remember.

Consider creating a YouTube page and creating videos to upload. Videos that do well on YouTube (if done correctly) are instructional videos or “tip” type of videos.

Build a LinkedIn profile for yourself, and start connecting with other professionals that you know. It doesn’t matter if they’re in the same industry or not. If you know them, connect with them! You never know what kinds of doors those connections might open.

Conclusion

There you have it- the basics of social media marketing, along with a few ways you can get started.

Obviously I didn’t go into setting up ads on Facebook or YouTube, as those take a little more time to explain. Plus, remember that ALL forms of advertising have a learning curve, so it takes a few tries before you really figure out what works best for you.